4 ms·

> "now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" "Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." I hate going to work and

> "now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" "Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." I hate going to work and reinventing wheels all day because the company I work for thinks it's so special that every business function needs a 100% tailored solution to solved problems. I much prefer working somewhere that's able to tailor business processes to conform to existing standards. But maybe that's just me.

maccard 7mo ago
I’ve interviewed a few hundred people. Probably approaching a thousand, if not already. An interview is a scenario, and if you aren’t willing to engage in the scenario that we all agreed to partake in, that’s a huge warning sign that you’re going to be difficult later down the line. The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.
- Quarrelsome 7mo ago
  but also maybe its a green flag in that this employee might see the wood for the trees and save the company a lot of money later down the line. In my experience, a lot of engineers can waste a lot of time dicking around re-inventing wheels and whatnot. While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate [0]. For reference, I think both answers are fine and both perspectives (its a positive or a negative) are equally valid. Its just that I don't think we can confidently state either way. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3ETK7-ZM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3ETK7-ZM8
  - pibaker 7mo ago
    I think you missed the point in GP's post. Not all organizations optimize for problem solving. Some organizations prefer subordinates who follow orders (or better, is able to read the mind of the boss to decipher what order he is actually making) than those who breaks out of the box and says ”just use gsuite, boss."
    - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
      sure but if its not a privately held business then using gsuite is better for the shareholders. Ultimately its the bosses choice, but for the board to fire them its worth knowing they were aware of being able to use gsuite instead of pissing away resource on a needless project.
      - maccard 7mo ago
        The question isn’t should we use gsuite, it’s can we talk about a tech problem. If you don’t understand that you’ve failed the interview.
        Quarrelsome 7mo ago
        and if you don't understand my position then you've failed to interview. Some people just seek reasons to disqualify candidates and I think that's a pretty basic approach to interviewing. Remember, we all have a cognitive bias to hire ourselves and part of improving interviewing process is about trying to mitigate that by creating an environment where the interviewee can show the best of themselves, which may not necessarily reflect our own strengths. This is why pop quiz questions are kinda crap and while 1337code is better, its still kinda crap
        maccard 7mo ago
        If the interview goes: > What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? > I’d use google sheets > Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" > Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand. I’ve not failed to interview. The candidate has been a jerk. Could I have asked a better question? Sure. Could the candidate not have sneered at it and thrown a strop - definitely.
  - rat9988 7mo ago
    if you answer ""Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." You probably are missing the wood and the trees.
    - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
      and if you hire only based on solely on employee compliance then you are also probably missing the wood for the trees. I've worked in such orgs and they're extremely vulnerable to cargo culting.
      - maccard 7mo ago
        I’m not hiring on compliance. I’ve accepted that his answer is correct but asked for the purposes of the exercise if he can put that to a side so we can talk about it. I’ve worked with and hired people like this and they tend to turn every molehill into a mountain, which is just killer on a small team.
  - maccard 7mo ago
    > While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate Yes, I did. More than once. I always regretted it. Sure it could be a cognitive bias, but the entire interview process is essentially trying to figure out “can I work with this person”. > I think both answers are fine and both perspectives are equally valid I disagree - refusing to engage with the interview because you don’t like the question is perfectly valid to do, but don’t expect me to want to work with you over it. We’ve only got an hour, maximum, so any scenario we come up with is going to be contrived and simplified - if you can’t accept that then I’m going to make my decision based on that.
    - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
      > Yes, I did. More than once. I always regretted it. Fair. > I disagree - refusing to engage with the interview because you don’t like the question is perfectly valid to do, but don’t expect me to want to work with you over it. We’ve only got an hour, maximum, so any scenario we come up with is going to be contrived and simplified - if you can’t accept that then I’m going to make my decision based on that. Sure but lets not forget the other perspective. Candidates have to interview for a cumulative many hours over the course of a job hunt, only to have many interviewers batter them with an array of 1337code, pop quizes or contrived examples, none of which reflect the day to day work of the position they will fill. From their perspective their answer could well be a good one, albeit I agree that having some level of willingness to engage in the theatre is a positive sign. In an auto-interview I recently did, I was given extremely limited time to "refactor" a bunch of code that was clearly broken. I chose not to refactor and instead fix the brokeness of the code, however I entirely expect to fail the interview because I fixed the problems instead of removing a couple of obviously duplicated code blocks. I can see why I would fail by not "following orders" but their async code was broken and the awful exception handling botched all their telemetry. From a "big picture" perspective I did do the right thing but it might be the case they're too stupid to know that I was doing the right thing (they're a multi-language company, so I assume they're less good at the language I specialise in). Personally I think due to lack of industry organisation around certification or any sort of guild or union, we have a seriously difficult problem around hiring across the industry. In response to the extremely challenging task of vetting programmers I feel like orgs are simply fishing for reasons to disqualify candidates, as a reaction to this problem. The rare positive experiences I've had interviewing were Amazon, who act like they want you to succeeed instead of fail or orgs that just half-ass it with low bar challenges, who seemingly accept that they're not capable of perfectly vetting a candidate.
- AntiDyatlov 7mo ago
  I think the contrived scenarios you come up with need to not have a trivial solution. Everything about my brain is optimized for KISS, it breaks everything to turn down simple solutions to reach for something more complex.
- theli0nheart 7mo ago
  Most real-world scenarios aren't so arbitrary, and hardly any have a "right answer". If I had a candidate that broke out of the box of our interview to give a good answer, and that's not the answer I "want", I'd be more likely to believe the interview question is the problem, not the candidate.
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    remember that we already did the "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" part. the "good answer" was already acknowledged, the "real-world scenario" answer was accepted. the second part ("what if we wanted to build it in-house") is purely hypothetical to gauge how the interviewee would approach the specific technical challenge (shedding some of the "real-world" constraints so that the focus is technical). if they again say "well that is dumb i would just use sheets", that is absolutely an interviewee problem.
    - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
      Depends on the dyanmic. If you have an excellent candidate you're trying to poach, it becomes an intervewing problem because you're wasting both you and their time. If they are a dime a dozen, then it becomes their problem. Whether or not they care it's their problem depends on their circumstance.
      - john_strinlai 7mo ago
        im sorry but i do not understand any of your comment. >it becomes an intervewing problem because you're wasting both you and their time. how is it a waste of time to ask a technical question in an interview? >If you have an excellent candidate [...] If they are a dime a dozen how do you determine if they are an excellent candidate or an average one without asking any technical questions in the interview? >Whether or not they care it's their problem depends on their circumstance. care about getting the job? why would they interview if they didnt care about getting the job?
- munchbunny 7mo ago
  > The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it. I think a lot of people miss this point. Real projects are complex and have tons of context at the historic layer, political layer, and technical layer. If I have one hour to do the interview, I need to get to some shared context with the candidate quickly, or else it'll just be an hour of me whining about my job. And I usually don't need someone who is already a senior subject matter expert, so I'm not going to ask the type of question that is so far down the rabbit hole that we're in "wheels haven't been invented yet" territory. Fundamentally, that's why I'm asking a somewhat generic design question. I do also dig into how they navigated those layers in their past experience, but if I don't see them in action in some way then that's just missing signal I can't hire on, and that helps neither me nor the candidate. In another company or timeline perhaps I could run a different interview style, but often you're working within the constraints of both what the candidate is willing to do and what the company standardized on (which is my current situation).
- wpietri 7mo ago
  I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure. I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not professionals. Ditto for ones who act like everything is a nail for their coding hammer. A developer who can save a company a couple hundred thousand dollars by not turning something simple into a big coding project is a rare and precious commodity. Or should be, at least. The thing to do isn't to give demerits for "being difficult". The thing to do is to then add something to the scenario where they get into the thing you want them to get to. "For this, we need better access control than Google Sheets allows us." Or, "We need this to be more closely integrated with our accounting system." Unless, of course, what you're hiring for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power. Which, honestly, a lot of places are.
  - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
    > I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. <3. What do you think makes the difference here in orgs that respect this and those that simply try to hire yesmen?
    - wpietri 7mo ago
      Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success. I think all of those tendencies come to the fore at any organization that doesn't have either a strong sense of mission or a sufficiently desperate need for success that they pay attention to material reality rather than social reality. With a possible partial exception for things like co-ops and other places where the culture is fundamentally different enough. E.g., Mondragon, or Zingerman's. I think Google, back in its don't be evil/organize the world's information era, probably qualified. They started with a very strong mission-driven culture rooted in academics and engineering. It took a fair bit of time for MBA dogmas to make it like most other places. But from everything I hear, what once felt almost like a calling now is just another job.
- mv4 7mo ago
  I also feel it's very easy for a good interviewer to bring the conversation back to the desired scenario. Anything from "imagine we are in a parallel universe where Google Sheets has not been invented yet" to "how would you design a google sheets competitor" would do the trick. Source: interviewed hundreds, incl FAANG.
  - maccard 7mo ago
    Yeah - for sure. When I’m interviewing I want to give the candidate the best chance of success and to show off both what they know and how they will work with me. I generally give it three goes with questions like these - the initial ask, and two clarifications. If we’re not getting anywhere I move on.
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  Depends on the dynamics here. Remember that an interview is 2-way. Someone giving an answer like "that's a silly, unrealistic scenario" is more likely than not someone who isn't in need for that job to begin with. I'm sure it's something many wish they could say, because the interview pipeline can be very grating. But not everyone needs to play that game.
- rudnevr 7mo ago
  did it ever occur to you that you might be living in a self-reinforcing feedback loop? how long ago have been in interviewee's shoes?
Tepix 7mo ago
Setup Etherpad
docmars 7mo ago
Think of it this way: they're paying you lots of money to build something boring that has a lot of prior art/research available to you for free. This could be the easiest money maker in your life. It's not your problem they're hellbent on building a new wheel. They're willing to pay you! Chances are, you've thought of your own pain points in whatever they've asked you to build and you've now got an opportunity to shine by solving them and demonstrate your expertise.
- pavlus 7mo ago
  There is a tool invented lately, that's very good for solving problems, that are well-researched and had been solved multiple times already. This tool is actually why there is a RAM shortage in the world right now. Some even say, this tool will replace a lot of workers soon(sic!).
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  But if you're already paid lots of money to work on stuff you actually care about... why bother? That's the goal of "fuck you" money. You go through the politics and pantomimes until you have the power to stop playning those games.
  - docmars 7mo ago
    Very true, that's the goal at least! Founders may just learn the hard way until the right people tell them no.

maccard 7mo ago

I’ve interviewed a few hundred people. Probably approaching a thousand, if not already. An interview is a scenario, and if you aren’t willing to engage in the scenario that we all agreed to partake in, that’s a huge warning sign that you’re going to be difficult later down the line. The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.

Quarrelsome 7mo ago
but also maybe its a green flag in that this employee might see the wood for the trees and save the company a lot of money later down the line. In my experience, a lot of engineers can waste a lot of time dicking around re-inventing wheels and whatnot. While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate [0]. For reference, I think both answers are fine and both perspectives (its a positive or a negative) are equally valid. Its just that I don't think we can confidently state either way. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3ETK7-ZM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3ETK7-ZM8
- pibaker 7mo ago
  I think you missed the point in GP's post. Not all organizations optimize for problem solving. Some organizations prefer subordinates who follow orders (or better, is able to read the mind of the boss to decipher what order he is actually making) than those who breaks out of the box and says ”just use gsuite, boss."
  - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
    sure but if its not a privately held business then using gsuite is better for the shareholders. Ultimately its the bosses choice, but for the board to fire them its worth knowing they were aware of being able to use gsuite instead of pissing away resource on a needless project.
    - maccard 7mo ago
      The question isn’t should we use gsuite, it’s can we talk about a tech problem. If you don’t understand that you’ve failed the interview.
      - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
        and if you don't understand my position then you've failed to interview. Some people just seek reasons to disqualify candidates and I think that's a pretty basic approach to interviewing. Remember, we all have a cognitive bias to hire ourselves and part of improving interviewing process is about trying to mitigate that by creating an environment where the interviewee can show the best of themselves, which may not necessarily reflect our own strengths. This is why pop quiz questions are kinda crap and while 1337code is better, its still kinda crap
        maccard 7mo ago
        If the interview goes: > What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? > I’d use google sheets > Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" > Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand. I’ve not failed to interview. The candidate has been a jerk. Could I have asked a better question? Sure. Could the candidate not have sneered at it and thrown a strop - definitely.
- rat9988 7mo ago
  if you answer ""Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." You probably are missing the wood and the trees.
  - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
    and if you hire only based on solely on employee compliance then you are also probably missing the wood for the trees. I've worked in such orgs and they're extremely vulnerable to cargo culting.
    - maccard 7mo ago
      I’m not hiring on compliance. I’ve accepted that his answer is correct but asked for the purposes of the exercise if he can put that to a side so we can talk about it. I’ve worked with and hired people like this and they tend to turn every molehill into a mountain, which is just killer on a small team.
- maccard 7mo ago
  > While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate Yes, I did. More than once. I always regretted it. Sure it could be a cognitive bias, but the entire interview process is essentially trying to figure out “can I work with this person”. > I think both answers are fine and both perspectives are equally valid I disagree - refusing to engage with the interview because you don’t like the question is perfectly valid to do, but don’t expect me to want to work with you over it. We’ve only got an hour, maximum, so any scenario we come up with is going to be contrived and simplified - if you can’t accept that then I’m going to make my decision based on that.
  - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
    > Yes, I did. More than once. I always regretted it. Fair. > I disagree - refusing to engage with the interview because you don’t like the question is perfectly valid to do, but don’t expect me to want to work with you over it. We’ve only got an hour, maximum, so any scenario we come up with is going to be contrived and simplified - if you can’t accept that then I’m going to make my decision based on that. Sure but lets not forget the other perspective. Candidates have to interview for a cumulative many hours over the course of a job hunt, only to have many interviewers batter them with an array of 1337code, pop quizes or contrived examples, none of which reflect the day to day work of the position they will fill. From their perspective their answer could well be a good one, albeit I agree that having some level of willingness to engage in the theatre is a positive sign. In an auto-interview I recently did, I was given extremely limited time to "refactor" a bunch of code that was clearly broken. I chose not to refactor and instead fix the brokeness of the code, however I entirely expect to fail the interview because I fixed the problems instead of removing a couple of obviously duplicated code blocks. I can see why I would fail by not "following orders" but their async code was broken and the awful exception handling botched all their telemetry. From a "big picture" perspective I did do the right thing but it might be the case they're too stupid to know that I was doing the right thing (they're a multi-language company, so I assume they're less good at the language I specialise in). Personally I think due to lack of industry organisation around certification or any sort of guild or union, we have a seriously difficult problem around hiring across the industry. In response to the extremely challenging task of vetting programmers I feel like orgs are simply fishing for reasons to disqualify candidates, as a reaction to this problem. The rare positive experiences I've had interviewing were Amazon, who act like they want you to succeeed instead of fail or orgs that just half-ass it with low bar challenges, who seemingly accept that they're not capable of perfectly vetting a candidate.
AntiDyatlov 7mo ago
I think the contrived scenarios you come up with need to not have a trivial solution. Everything about my brain is optimized for KISS, it breaks everything to turn down simple solutions to reach for something more complex.
theli0nheart 7mo ago
Most real-world scenarios aren't so arbitrary, and hardly any have a "right answer". If I had a candidate that broke out of the box of our interview to give a good answer, and that's not the answer I "want", I'd be more likely to believe the interview question is the problem, not the candidate.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  remember that we already did the "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" part. the "good answer" was already acknowledged, the "real-world scenario" answer was accepted. the second part ("what if we wanted to build it in-house") is purely hypothetical to gauge how the interviewee would approach the specific technical challenge (shedding some of the "real-world" constraints so that the focus is technical). if they again say "well that is dumb i would just use sheets", that is absolutely an interviewee problem.
  - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    Depends on the dyanmic. If you have an excellent candidate you're trying to poach, it becomes an intervewing problem because you're wasting both you and their time. If they are a dime a dozen, then it becomes their problem. Whether or not they care it's their problem depends on their circumstance.
    - john_strinlai 7mo ago
      im sorry but i do not understand any of your comment. >it becomes an intervewing problem because you're wasting both you and their time. how is it a waste of time to ask a technical question in an interview? >If you have an excellent candidate [...] If they are a dime a dozen how do you determine if they are an excellent candidate or an average one without asking any technical questions in the interview? >Whether or not they care it's their problem depends on their circumstance. care about getting the job? why would they interview if they didnt care about getting the job?
munchbunny 7mo ago
> The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it. I think a lot of people miss this point. Real projects are complex and have tons of context at the historic layer, political layer, and technical layer. If I have one hour to do the interview, I need to get to some shared context with the candidate quickly, or else it'll just be an hour of me whining about my job. And I usually don't need someone who is already a senior subject matter expert, so I'm not going to ask the type of question that is so far down the rabbit hole that we're in "wheels haven't been invented yet" territory. Fundamentally, that's why I'm asking a somewhat generic design question. I do also dig into how they navigated those layers in their past experience, but if I don't see them in action in some way then that's just missing signal I can't hire on, and that helps neither me nor the candidate. In another company or timeline perhaps I could run a different interview style, but often you're working within the constraints of both what the candidate is willing to do and what the company standardized on (which is my current situation).
wpietri 7mo ago
I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure. I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not professionals. Ditto for ones who act like everything is a nail for their coding hammer. A developer who can save a company a couple hundred thousand dollars by not turning something simple into a big coding project is a rare and precious commodity. Or should be, at least. The thing to do isn't to give demerits for "being difficult". The thing to do is to then add something to the scenario where they get into the thing you want them to get to. "For this, we need better access control than Google Sheets allows us." Or, "We need this to be more closely integrated with our accounting system." Unless, of course, what you're hiring for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power. Which, honestly, a lot of places are.
- Quarrelsome 7mo ago
  > I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. <3. What do you think makes the difference here in orgs that respect this and those that simply try to hire yesmen?
  - wpietri 7mo ago
    Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success. I think all of those tendencies come to the fore at any organization that doesn't have either a strong sense of mission or a sufficiently desperate need for success that they pay attention to material reality rather than social reality. With a possible partial exception for things like co-ops and other places where the culture is fundamentally different enough. E.g., Mondragon, or Zingerman's. I think Google, back in its don't be evil/organize the world's information era, probably qualified. They started with a very strong mission-driven culture rooted in academics and engineering. It took a fair bit of time for MBA dogmas to make it like most other places. But from everything I hear, what once felt almost like a calling now is just another job.
mv4 7mo ago
I also feel it's very easy for a good interviewer to bring the conversation back to the desired scenario. Anything from "imagine we are in a parallel universe where Google Sheets has not been invented yet" to "how would you design a google sheets competitor" would do the trick. Source: interviewed hundreds, incl FAANG.
- maccard 7mo ago
  Yeah - for sure. When I’m interviewing I want to give the candidate the best chance of success and to show off both what they know and how they will work with me. I generally give it three goes with questions like these - the initial ask, and two clarifications. If we’re not getting anywhere I move on.
johnnyanmac 7mo ago
Depends on the dynamics here. Remember that an interview is 2-way. Someone giving an answer like "that's a silly, unrealistic scenario" is more likely than not someone who isn't in need for that job to begin with. I'm sure it's something many wish they could say, because the interview pipeline can be very grating. But not everyone needs to play that game.
rudnevr 7mo ago
did it ever occur to you that you might be living in a self-reinforcing feedback loop? how long ago have been in interviewee's shoes?

Tepix 7mo ago

Setup Etherpad

docmars 7mo ago

Think of it this way: they're paying you lots of money to build something boring that has a lot of prior art/research available to you for free. This could be the easiest money maker in your life. It's not your problem they're hellbent on building a new wheel. They're willing to pay you! Chances are, you've thought of your own pain points in whatever they've asked you to build and you've now got an opportunity to shine by solving them and demonstrate your expertise.

pavlus 7mo ago
There is a tool invented lately, that's very good for solving problems, that are well-researched and had been solved multiple times already. This tool is actually why there is a RAM shortage in the world right now. Some even say, this tool will replace a lot of workers soon(sic!).
johnnyanmac 7mo ago
But if you're already paid lots of money to work on stuff you actually care about... why bother? That's the goal of "fuck you" money. You go through the politics and pantomimes until you have the power to stop playning those games.
- docmars 7mo ago
  Very true, that's the goal at least! Founders may just learn the hard way until the right people tell them no.